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Contents of Case 4: 32 objects

Sculpture, Busts

The American Sculpture Collection
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection offers a lively survey of sculptural practice in North America and the Spanish American colonies over three centuries, in a variety of materials (predominantly marble and bronze) and a medley of styles. Most of the Museum’s American sculpture is now in the Visible Storage Study Center and the adjacent American Identities galleries.

From the Neoclassical marble females of Hiram Powers and Richard Greenough to Gaston Lachaise’s modernist bronze goddess, the full-length human figure has been a central preoccupation of many sculptors represented in the collection. For Spanish colonial carvers, it took the form of the devotional figure in wood, often embellished with painted surfaces and sometimes with more precious materials like ivory and silver. In contrast, twentieth-century modernist carvers, like Chaim Gross, preferred to leave the wooden surface of the figure in a natural state.

Portrait busts in stone, bronze, and even wood are among the most common sculptural forms here, with origins in antiquity. Whether conceived as private commemoration or as public icon, the portrait bust, like the painted portrait, served as the mainstay of many artists’ careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executed in a spectrum of styles from realism to modernism. Most are about life-size, adding to their expressive power to commit a mortal human face to the permanence of bronze or stone.

Reliefs, another ancient form of sculpture in which figures project from a background, bring the two-dimensional illusionism of painting to the enduring medium of bronze or marble. Among the many sculptors represented in the collection, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Olin Levi Warner, and Helen Farnsworth Mears excelled at exploiting this pictorial quality, using delicate drawing and subtle modeling in their bronze portrait plaques. Some reliefs here are in the form of round or oval medallions, which recalled the coins and cameos of antiquity.

Brooklyn’s collection is rich in the work of American “animaliers,” later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sculptors who specialized in bronze animal sculptures, usually executed on a small scale. These works portray highly naturalistic, usually wild, animals, often in vigorous action or combat. Once a model was created, usually in clay, multiple bronze casts could be made for a mass market eager to decorate domestic interiors. Some of these bronzes, like the small version of Alexander Phimister Proctor’s great pumas flanking the Ninth Street gate to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, are reduced-scale models of large outdoor sculptures.

Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf A (Sculpture)
88.162 Jo Davidson
Portrait Bust of Israel Chatinover 1931

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf B (Sculpture)
28.424 Malvina Hoffman
Portrait of Giovanni Boldini

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf C (Sculpture)
47.152 Concetta Scaravaglione
Abraham Walkowitz ca. 1943

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf E (Sculpture)
09.876 Solon H. Borglum
Charles A. Schieren 1909

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30.924 William Ordway Partridge
Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson 1899

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf F (Sculpture)
21.398 Victor David Brenner
Bust of Samuel P. Avery, Jr. 1847-1920

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58.183 Oscar Miestchaninoff
Head of a Young Bulgarian 1920

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf G (Sculpture)
73.58 Chester Beach
Helen ca. 1909-1910

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf H (Sculpture)
27.740 Waldemar Rannus
Le Negre before 1927

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45.67.1 Harry Levine
Negro Head n.d.

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf I (Sculpture)
30.1110 Emile Robert Zettler
Ted Wagner ca. 1925

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1992.106 Max Bachmann
Portrait of an Indian 1900-1905

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf J (Sculpture)
66.27.4 John Mackie Falconer
Plaque of John Mackie Falconer (Self-Portrait) ca. 1870

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2010.4 Frederick William MacMonnies
Bozzetto of Pioneer Mother for Pioneer Monument ca. 1906-1910

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf K (Sculpture)
23.288.3 Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Jules Bastien-Lepage Modelled 1880

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24.429 William R. O' Donovan
Bust of Winslow Homer 1876, cast ca. 1911

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74.209 Laura Ziegler
David Levine 1974

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81.38 Jacques Lipchitz
Bust of Marsden Hartley 1942

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf L (Sculpture)
22.1958.1 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Paul Wayland Bartlett 1917

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22.1958.2 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Daniel Chester French 1919

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22.1958.3 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Walter Griffin 1919

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22.1958.4 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Julian Alden Weir 1918

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22.1958.5 John Flanagan
Portrait Plaque of Childe Hassam 1909

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22.1958.6 John Flanagan
Portrait Medal of Joseph Pennell 1919

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24.557 Olin Levi Warner
"Friend Fenton" 1878

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2002.2 William Rush
Self Portrait (The Pine Knot Portrait) 1822; cast 1971

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32.2092.4 Emil Fuchs
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson 1898

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf M (Sculpture)
18.189 Olin Levi Warner
Joseph Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekht, Chief of the Nez Percé Indians 1889

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf O (Sculpture)
00.158 William Ordway Partridge
A Madonna ca. 1890

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50.37 Alfeo Faggi
Christ in the Garden 1949

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Visible Storage: Case 4, Shelf P (Sculpture)
13.1055 Vitorio Salvatore
Bust of a Child n.d.

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24.552 Carl E. Akeley
The Old Man of Mikeno 1923

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